I see a lot of people, I mean *a lot* of people spewing hate and bigotry over all that has happened over the past few weeks. It's been growing and growing over the last four years but it's gotten to a horrible point with the 'shutdown'. I just viewed this post : http://www.eutimes.net/2013/10/pentagon-warns-to-expect-radical-change-in-us-government-soon/. It was followed shortly by a bunch of other posts attacking Obama and all he's done to ruin the government. Well, honestly I think it's ridiculous as he's not in the Senate or the House any longer and the shutdown came about because Congress, which is made up of both the Senate and the House of Representatives, would not agree on a spending budget for the country. Obama didn't veto a budget like Clinton did 17 years ago. He really isn't the one to blame, or at least not completely. People seem to like to point the finger at him more than the people who are truly responsible just because he's either the president or because he's black (or Muslim, depending on who you ask).
Why must we hate all the time? Seems like we always have a group of people to hate: Commies, Nazis, the French, the Brits, now Arabs and Muslims...at one point we hated the Japanese too. I guess we'll have to hate on the Canadians once we get over our hate for Arabs and Muslims. Maybe we'll also hate Brazil too, especially after the World Cup. Maybe our country is just based on hate and maybe that's why it's falling apart. It takes far too much energy to hate than it does to live peacefully and live and let live. Oh shit, does that sound too much like Socialism? I can never tell these days as everything that used to just be normal or sound good is now either Socialist or anti-American.
There's a girl at my work who is having severe difficulty grasping how the world really works. I guess it ended up happening at first when she got divorced. Apparently when she was growing up, the world worked like this: graduate high school, get a husband who'll take care of you, have kids, retire at 65 and live happily ever after. No one prepared her for the divorce that would happen, or her losing her job at AT&T that she had for 15 years. No one prepared her for having to sell her house and start looking for apartments. No one prepared her for the loss of her other job she got when she was trying to get back on her feet again when some guy decided to stalk her and when she went to HR, she was fired for being a nuisance. She wasn't prepared to deal with life as it really is rather than the fairy tale she bought into when she was young and didn't know any better. It's really sad to hear her sometimes. She rants about how she's against Obamacare and all the things he's done, but yet she empathizes with the homeless guy on the corner. She seems to think they can all be saved and given a chance to redeem themselves. If that were the case it'd be great. But a bunch of the homeless people we have in the city have some sort of mental issue that makes them unaware that their behaviors are not socially acceptable and lack the ability to change and fix that so they can actually hold down a job. There are plenty of homeless people who are homeless simply so they don't have to answer to anyone, they don't have to live on anyone else's schedule but their own. I know so, I've stopped and talked to many of them since I too at one point was homeless. I'd see them at Food Not Bombs and sometimes I was the girl handing out the food, sometimes in the line to get it. In order for the homeless peoples to not be homeless any more, they need support and motivation. They have to have a want to change the way they live and once they have that need, there needs to be something in place to help them out. Do you know how hard it is to apply for jobs when you don't have an address or a phone number? Do you know how hard it is to go to an interview in ragged clothes because it's all you own at the moment? Do you know that most places will turn you away if you have facial hair or your hair is all matted since you don't have ready access to a shower and a razor? Most of the republicans are wont to limit the funding for such places that would help those folks out, but yet here's this extreme tea party gal who wants to give the poor guy a chance. She doesn't like the idea of food stamps either, but honestly if she needs em, I'm sure she'd be first in line to sign up for them.
There definitely is something broken about this country and honestly I think it stems from the greed and the hate that this country is based on. I'm not all about everyone sharing the wealth equally, nor am I for letting people outright starve. But I'm all for doing what you chose to do as long as you let me chose to do what I want to do as well, while not criticizing my decision to do it. I just want that to be a universal thing; live and let live. If you want to be a fat person with diabetes, fine, be a fat person with diabetes. If you want to be rich and live in a mansion, fine, go to school, study hard and meet the right people. If you want to be a housewife, fine, take a few cooking classes and possibly learn to knit and sew and do some household repairs. If you want to be hippie, be a hippie. If you want to just get by, fine, do what you have to to get by. If you want to be homeless and just live life on a whim, by all means do it. I won't judge you for it.
